UZBEKISTAN Law and Practice Contributed by: Sherzod Abdulkasimov, Nazokat Kamilova and Navruza Yunusova, PraeLegal Uzbekistan
agreement addressed in Article 12 of each of the ICA Law and the Law on Domestic Arbitration. The threshold requirement is that the agreement is in writing, which may be satisfied by an arbitration clause or a separate agreement whose content is recorded in any form, including electronic communi - cations. Under the ICA Law, the requirement is con - strued broadly – met also by an exchange of claim and defence in which one party asserts the agreement and the other does not deny it, and by incorporation of an arbitration clause by reference; the Law on Domestic Arbitration lacks these extensions and is somewhat stricter. The agreement must also be made by parties with capacity, acting through duly authorised representa - tives and with genuine consent. Consistent with the principle of separability (Article 24 of the Law on Domestic Arbitration and its ICA Law counterpart), the arbitration agreement is independent of the main contract, so the latter’s invalidity does not of itself defeat it. At the enforcement stage, the party relying on the agreement must produce the original or a duly certi - fied copy. Recognition and enforcement of a foreign award is governed by Article 256 of the EP Code, whose refusal grounds mirror Article V of the New York Convention (including invalidity of the agreement and a party’s incapacity); domestic awards are enforced under the Law on Domestic Arbitration together with the EP Code. 3.2 Arbitrability Both regimes proceed from a broad notion of arbi - trability, subject to defined exclusions. The test turns on the nature of the underlying relationship: a dispute is arbitrable where it arises from a civil-law or com - mercial relationship the parties are free to dispose of, whereas disputes rooted in public-law relations or reserved to the state courts are not. For international arbitration, Article 4 of the ICA Law frames this by reference to a broad concept of “com - mercial”; for domestic arbitration, Article 9 of the Law on Domestic Arbitration allows disputes arising
from civil legal relations, including economic disputes between business entities. Non-arbitrable matters are those outside the civil and commercial sphere: administrative and other public- law disputes, and criminal, family and labour matters. Insolvency and bankruptcy are likewise non-arbitra - ble, as are certain intellectual property disputes (in particular, the grant or registration of rights subject to state registration) and any matter reserved by stat - ute to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state courts or whose resolution would offend public policy. These boundaries are, moreover, set to narrow for domestic arbitration. The Law on Amendments on Domestic Arbitration, which entered into force on 24 July 2026, amends the Law on Domestic Arbitration to exclude from arbitration disputes over land, disputes over the establishment of ownership of buildings and struc - tures, and the recovery of money from the budgets of the budgetary system and from state bodies, institu - tions, enterprises with state participation and bodies of citizens’ self-government, and to bar state bodies, state institutions, enterprises with state participation and bodies of citizens’ self-government from being parties to a domestic arbitration agreement – a mate - rial contraction of arbitrability under the domestic regime. 3.3 National Courts’ Approach Neither statute lays down a choice-of-law rule for the arbitration agreement itself, and no separate line of authority has developed; the issue arises only at the set-aside and enforcement stages. Both Article 50 (setting aside) and Article 52 (refusing recognition and enforcement) of the ICA Law require the court to test the agreement’s validity under the law chosen by the parties and, failing a choice, under the law of the seat – Uzbek law where the seat is in Uzbekistan. The courts thus honour an express choice and resort to seat law only in its absence; because that fallback is narrow and untested, parties are well advised to designate the governing law expressly. On enforcement of arbitration agreements, Article 13 of the ICA Law obliges a court seised of a matter within a valid arbitration agreement to refer the parties to arbitration, on a party’s application made no later than its first statement on the substance of the dis -
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